Ep. 352: Arm Drag Concepts, feat. Niamh Bryn

Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatriz Ginn, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to bjjmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 352. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And today, got a friend who's pretty close by geographically, just a hop skip and a jump away from where I live. I got Nieve Bryn. Nieve, how's it going? Speaker 2: Pretty good. How about yourself, Steve? Speaker 1: Also good. Been looking forward to this chat. And we'll dig into the topic in a second, but first, you want to do a quick intro since this is the first time you've been on the show? Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm a recent transplant up to Seattle, Washington from Orlando, Florida. I've been doing Jiu-Jitsu for a little over 20 years at this point. I own a gym in Capitol Hill called Snowblind Jiu-Jitsu, where we focus on kind of a culture-first environment. And I think we have a variety of friends in common that have kind of put us in touch for this. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Probably the uh, the main one, Jeff Shaw. Um, he's the kind of name that comes up a lot, especially when I talk about people down in Washington. But something that I know you did with him recently, you were just hosting a seminar out of his gym, Bellingham BJJ, and he was sending me photos and you guys were covering arm drags. And that got me thinking, this is a topic that I've actually never really talked about here on the show before, and it's such a fundamental technique in Jiu-Jitsu for a variety of reasons, which I'm sure we can get into. But that got me thinking, you know what, we should maybe have you on to recap some of the stuff that you've been teaching. And particularly the the big concepts behind arm drags. The the why behind why they work. With a technique like arm drags, I think most people from a very early on stage in Jiu-Jitsu, they're taught what appears to be this relatively simple move, but it turns out that with arm drags and a lot of moves like arm drags, really there's a lot of factors that go into making them work beyond just knowing proper hand placement. And things like timing come so much into play when you do something like arm drags. And you'd mentioned that you've got some good thoughts on how to make arm drags more accessible to pretty much everybody. So, I'll maybe turn it over to you to kind of give everyone the pitch. Why do we need to learn arm drags? Like why are they so useful? And where do most coaches go wrong in terms of how they teach these? Speaker 2: Sure. This is a, this is a great topic. So, I think with the sort of base level techniques, things we might think of as, you know, beginner-friendly Jiu-Jitsu, something like your arm drag, you quite often, you know, you learned this when you were a white belt, I'm sure, like just about everybody does. But, you know, did you continue with the application of that? Did it ever develop past that point? Kind of crazy if it didn't. They're really versatile. Uh, look at, you know, wrestling or a lot of other grappling-centric martial arts. These are pretty core techniques. So, yes, one of the things that I think is so great about the arm drag is its versatility. I think a lot of times for a smaller grappler especially, over time, there's one or two techniques we we kind of write off as non-viable. You know, you're smaller, maybe even like 100 pounds smaller, you go to arm drag someone, it doesn't work. Well, you know, that arm drag's now removed from your game. But uh, that's kind of a crazy thought. So, uh, touching on on some of the stuff that uh I talked about with Jeff, going for the arm drag, I'm not looking for a definitive result. So, I think that's what makes a technique more useful and more versatile is the outcomes. We can put in a relatively low investment early on. For me, it's just feeding the grip, touching the elbow. That's really all I'm looking for. So, like, we're getting to the point that we're touching the elbow, and once we touch the elbow, we're looking to see how our opponent's going to respond, and this can kind of feed into a variety of responses. Perhaps I'm strong enough to move you. Great. I move you and I can see your back. This is the traditional arm drag that we see like the uh closed guard arm drag, right? Going to the back take. Everybody knows this one. But from standing, you know, you get exactly the same result. But maybe you're way stronger than me. Maybe there's no way to move you. Well, great. I can get some elbow flare in there. I can bend your arm and maybe I can move myself. Now, that's a viable technique for anyone of any size. Maybe I can feed the arm down away from your body and get around it, or maybe pull you towards the ground instead. So now, instantly, I've created, you know, four or five paths out of this technique. And that, I think, is the cornerstone of what makes for efficient Jiu-Jitsu is Jiu-Jitsu where you're not telling people, you must be railroaded into this path, or you must be this strong, or you must be this fast for this technique to work. You're really cutting down on the viability of those techniques when that happens. So, does that sort of make sense so far as a as a concept there? Speaker 1: Yeah, Nieve, that makes perfect sense. And I think that's a really great insight. I like the detail you brought up there about how with arm drags, people often make this mistake of thinking this is an all or nothing technique. And I've either got it or I don't. And this is where many beginners get so discouraged about an arm drag because if you just do an arm drag without any real setup, and if you're really telegraphing what you're doing, then a person's natural response when someone tries an arm drag on them is to just stiffen up and not let them do that. An arm drag is a very challenging move to just do in isolation if the other person sees it coming. Even an untrained person in Jiu-Jitsu, their natural body response to an arm drag will be to stiffen up and counterbalance and make it hard for you to drag them off balance. And so I think many beginners who tend to think of Jiu-Jitsu in terms of individual techniques that you just do or you don't, they see something like an arm drag and maybe they'll try it and the other person will just not let them do it. And they'll think, oh, this technique isn't great. It doesn't work for me. And they'll move on to something else. Or maybe they will erroneously think that the problem is strength. And they'll think, well, I'm just not strong enough to overpower this person and pull them off balance. And the thing about arm drags is if you really have to work to pull the person off balance and actually use strength, then you're not doing a very good arm drag because that means that due to the way you're setting it up, you're giving the other person too much notice and they're able to balance their weight accordingly. So, that's kind of a common problem I think with arm drags. You you very accurately described that people get railroaded down these technique paths and they think this is either going to work or it doesn't. But I think the arm drag is better seen as this more nuanced thing that you can use to set up other moves or you can use it at the end of a setup where maybe someone thinks that something else is coming and then you hit them with an arm drag really quick when they're not expecting it. Speaker 2: Yeah, a uh a kind of interesting thing about it is uh if you think about any application of the arm drag that you've ever seen from another position, you know, other other than wrestling, the closed guard one or any other version of that, half guard, anything. You know, there you've probably applied that technique before in a way where you moved yourself or you connected to the shoulder joint or you floated into another technique. And at no point did you ever think, well gosh, I'm not strong enough to do this or like I'm not large enough to make the arm drag work here. That's always seen as the domain of, you know, small agile grapplers. So, it seems like somewhat crazy to me that uh like from a wrestling position, people will go for it and fire that one single, I've got to put my whole body into this and it's like, oh, I didn't move the person, the technique failed, like mentality, but that doesn't really like even make sense at all in the application of that technique. You're doing it correctly in other positions, you're seeing the viability of it in other positions and then you're not seeing it there. And I mean, that's maybe endemic to the way that Jiu-Jitsu people treat stand up somewhat too. Or possibly, you know, the way that uh we kind of don't teach branching paths a lot of times and don't say, hey, like what are you controlling in this? What are we actually looking for? For me, a technique is kind of defined by its its method of control. I'm looking to touch the elbow and I'm looking to control the shoulder joint there in the arm drag. I'm not looking to grab the wrist and like throw someone around anyway unless they're drastically smaller than me. So. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's very well said. In Jiu-Jitsu, we often encourage students to think that this is all about control and that good Jiu-Jitsu means the other person can't move. And hey, it's true that if you can prevent the person from moving, that's often going to work in your favor, but that's not the only way to control people. Sometimes the other person can move or is moving and you adjust your movements to work around them. That's very common in stand-up martial arts where the person is on their feet and so you can never really truly stop them from moving. So things like attacking from angles becomes much more important because otherwise you just can't hold a person in place long enough to to play your game. In Jiu-Jitsu, often we forget about that. And the arm drag is a great example of a move that has that in common with stand-up because usually when you're doing an arm drag, it's an early engagement technique. So it's something that you're doing to kind of enter into a tighter control much of the time. It's something that you're probably doing before you've got the person heavily wrapped up. And the reason you're trying to do it is because you're either trying to get the person off balance and force a reaction or you're trying to force an awkward angle. You talked again about stand-up martial arts. You hear in a lot of other martial arts this concept of crossing the center, which generally means that if you can get the person, you know, their arm past their spine or their their leg past their spine, it twists them at a weird angle where they can't fight effectively. And in the case of the arm drag, if you do it right, they can't really face you directly, at least for a split second, which is kind of the game with an arm drag. You're trying to get the other person at an angle where for just a moment, they're not facing you directly and that allows you to attack. And depending on the configuration, you know, if you're standing, that might mean like you said, you go for a back body lock. If you're on the ground, that might mean you go for a back take. And of course, the arm drag too, if the person pulls back and makes a big motion to compensate, it can open up pathways to the legs. Um I love going for a single off of an arm drag if the arm drag doesn't work. So, there's a lot of things that you can do from it. And again, I think you wisely bring up that much like with stand-up, it's kind of a loose engagement technique where the other person might still be moving and so that means that if you're the arm dragger, you have to be keeping an eye on the angle of their body and being willing to move yourself to accommodate around that. Speaker 2: Uh one thing that I I really love about the arm drag is for me personally, I'm looking for a lot of like elbow separation away from the body quite often, especially engaging in a in a stand-up situation. It opens up uh the inside space there, makes makes it possible to pummel for underhooks or, you know, go to single legs a lot more easily, a little less worry about the other person's hands coming back into play. So, the great thing about the arm drag is you can both attack it when elbow separation occurs because it's easier to get under the arm, it's easier to get that deep grip and really move or turn someone. But you can attack the arm drag specifically with the intent of getting the person to clear their elbow away from their body for you too. So, it's uh it's pretty like bi-directional. You can fire it early and get the grip or you can fire it late specifically to create that separation for a second technique, which is great. That's kind of like what I'm looking for in a technique is does it leave me both pathways out? And that for me makes it pretty strong. Uh it leaves my options relatively open and as you were saying, also, you do see some overlap with things like, you know, Wing Chun or Tai Chi. Uh when people are playing sticky hands, this is essentially what they're doing. They're they're fighting for this inside space. And that may be to, you know, a lighter degree than wrestling, but you can apply some of those concepts. Uh crossing the midline is a great concept. Uh anytime you get your arm pulled across your body, it's increasingly difficult to maintain your composure and your space there anymore. And just exposure to that space under the elbows is is so valuable in these sort of situations. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Especially against good grapplers who are aware of proper body positioning. They're going to make it really hard for you to get into that space under their elbows. They you know, that's a very dangerous space to allow someone to come into when you're playing Jiu-Jitsu or a grappling sport. And it gets progressively harder to do that as you fight more experienced people because they're less likely to make that mistake. And so the arm drag is a good technique for loosening people up. It's kind of like how if you're mounted on someone and they shell up and they make it hard for you to get access to their arms, sometimes you can threaten an Americana or a choke or something just to open them up, to force a reaction and to get them to start having to reposition their hands and that can then open up that space. The arm drag can be very good for that because even if it doesn't succeed, it's going to force the other person to do a counter reaction and in the process of doing that, there might be a second where there's a bit of daylight under their arm and that allows you to get in tight to do whatever other techniques you want to do as a setup. You talked about wrestling. This is actually one of my favorite lessons in terms of where to apply the arm drag. I used to train with a wrestling guy briefly and one of the setups that he liked to show was uh an arm drag into an inside trip, right? You just you arm drag and then while the person is focused on their upper body and they're trying to reposition, you drop down for an inside trip because there's a second where you've brought them in close enough and you've brought yourself in close enough to them that you can get to that leg. And then once they're retracting their arm and focused on that, it can leave a pathway to the lower body. So that's another good thing about the arm drag too is you don't have to use the arm drag to go to the back or do whatever you might expect is the obvious thing. You can use that as a misdirect so that while people are thinking that you're actually going after their upper body, you switch levels and go low instead. Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. And as much as I hate being a a cowardly guard puller sometimes, you know, the arm drag actually is a great setup for leg locks, which I do love. So, quite often you can get someone to stand up pretty tall if you're trying to feed those arm drags at them and they're increasingly trying to keep their arms away from you, not wanting to have that grip fight. It gets very easy to get to their hips much in the same way you described the inside trip, but dropping down, you know, into that space, pulling for maybe a much deeper guard position than you're going to get if you just sit on your butt and scoot towards somebody. So that uh that gives you, you know, an extra path in there as well if you're thinking more sport Jiu-Jitsu or more specific goal oriented right there as well. Speaker 1: Yeah. Additionally too, if you're talking about leg entanglements, the arm drag is a great way to pull the person on top of you. If the person is taking a more hunched over stance, even if they're up on their feet, sometimes it can be hard to get in close enough to get to their legs, but if you can get their arm, you can use the arm drag to pull them forward and that brings their legs closer. So it can make it easier for you to then enter that game. Often the challenge that at least that I have sometimes with leg entanglements is not so much the entanglement itself, but getting into that position. Because it's a it's a dangerous game to go from seated guard into a leg entanglement on a standing opponent. You got to be quite good at that because if you mess it up, they're going to just pass your guard or some other bad thing is going to happen to you. So the question then becomes, how do you close that distance and get into the leg drag? There's a few different ways to do it, but the arm drag is a very popular way to make that happen. Speaker 2: 100%. And uh, you know, we've seen the popularity and the success of things like the the shoulder clamp. A lot of that, you know, shoulder clamp butterfly game has been really popular and really effective too. That's been a pretty enduring technique. So I almost think of the arm drag as like the outside version of this, right? We're gaining control of a single side of the body, we're dragging the shoulder close, we're creating threatening rotation, and that allows us to attack in a variety of ways while holding this like sort of one corner of the four corners of the body close to us. And this also can apply, you know, uh momentum, speed with it. So we're not now in a static position. We're sort of entering from nothing, creating that in a couple of moments, and then we can flow into these other techniques, which is great, right? Uh we're engaging from a sweep. Like you pointed out, sometimes the hardest part of any technique is getting the technique to engage in the first place. Speaker 1: Well, here's a question on that topic. When you go for the arm drag, how do you like to configure or position your hands? Because there's different schools of thought. I mean, when I was when I was coming up when I was a young boy, they they taught me that, you know, the kind of classic arm drag was the cross-arm drag, which is where you with your arm, you reach across your body. So you're kind of going diagonally to the other person's arm. So what this means is if I'm, because we're mirrored, if I am doing an arm drag using my right arm, I would probably be reaching across, grabbing your right arm, because that's across the body, maybe cupping you by the the tricep and then giving you a pull, right, towards me. And that can work. That's a very classic way of doing an arm drag. The challenge with that though is that that is a 50/50 grip. So you can get reverse arm dragged because when you go into a 50/50 position like that, the other person can arm drag you if their timing is better. So there's also a a different way to arm drag, which is more kind of a same side arm drag. That would be where, you know, maybe I instead of reaching across my body, I grab your arm that's on the same side. So that might mean, for example, if I'm using my left arm to grab your tricep, I would be grabbing your right arm because we're mirrored. I know it's kind of difficult to explain this through audio. Hopefully that's clear, but the main point I'm trying to make is you can either reach across to the cross arm or you can drag on the same side arm. Do you have a preference one way or another in terms of which one you prefer and if so, why? Speaker 2: I would say probably 90% I'm reaching across, but I'll put kind of a an asterix on that. I'm often not trying to cross the arm over the body very dramatically. So, if we're kind of facing, you know, in a mirrored stance like you said, if I'm grabbing your left hand, I'm grabbing with my right hand on your wrist to feed, but instead of then like grabbing your tricep and trying to pull you across, turning your back or anything, what I'm usually trying to do is touch your elbow with my other hand. So I'm just reaching to the inside of your elbow and I'm trying to flare your elbow up. If you can kind of visualize what I'm trying to do is turn your arm into the position that it would be in for like a kimora. So sort of that 90 degree angle bend. And once that happens, I'm actually controlling you by your elbow, not your wrist. I'm typically going to point your hand down towards your hips and then either drag your elbow across to turn your back or I'm just going to hold you in that position. And I've got a substantial amount of control. If you can visualize, you know, what it feels like being held in the kimora, you're getting somewhat of a similar effect right there, which makes it really difficult for you to rotate that shoulder. And uh that's kind of what I'm looking for and that's where this technique for me really shines because this is the kind of strength or size negating version of the kimora that I think everyone can do a little more efficiently than the the more traditional one, right? Which is where sometimes we're getting stymied into that, oh, I can't move the person so this is not a valuable technique. Or maybe my arms are short or maybe their arms are long or, you know, any of the variables that keep you from coming close to someone's body are highly negated in this. And now I can choose whether I'd like to approach you, whether I'm going to try to rotate you, or I mean, sometimes I'll feed that directly into the kimora itself or some other, you know, similar attack there. I've got options basically. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point. The issue with kind of the classic arm drag, which is the one where you reach across, you cup their tricep and basically you just yank it like you're trying to rev a chainsaw or something. I mean, that can work, but it requires you first of all to be relatively strong because you are working directly against the other person's muscle at that angle. You know, you're if the person's elbow is in tight and you're just trying to rev their arm like a chainsaw, you're not really pulling their body out of alignment. And that so that requires you to be a little bit strong because you got to be able to pull the person off balance, but also it's easier for them to brace, right? It's easier for them to kind of keep their arms in position because they can engage their muscles to prevent you from pulling them. So that arm drag, the the classic rev the chainsaw one, that works best if either you catch the person off guard and they don't have time to brace their arm and then you really can yank them. Or also if you're using it more to move yourself. So, if instead of trying to pull the other person off balance, you're trying to hold their arm in position and then move yourself into place and kind of keep them wedged so they can't turn to face you, then that can work. But a more mechanically strong version of the arm drag is the one you described where instead of trying to just pull their arm across, you're actually trying to flare their elbow open like you're putting them kind of in a kimora. And that way, they're not really able to effectively engage their muscle anymore. I mean, you can actually take the person down just by doing that if you clear their elbow enough, right? I've certainly seen that happen where you you arm drag someone, you flare their elbow out into that kimora shape and then you realize, oh, this person's elbow is really far out. I can probably just force them to the ground with the arm control that I've got. That that can absolutely work if you can get the elbow separated enough. So, that I think is a great alternative arm drag for people who, especially if they're, you know, competing against someone who's just far bigger than them. It's a great way to negate some of that size and strength advantage. Speaker 2: Yes. So, my favorite techniques are ones that are defined by the opponent needing to give you a technical rather than an athletic response. So, something like this is is really great. Once you have someone caught in this position, it's drastically harder for them to just rip their arm out of the position. One of the failures of, you know, what you described in the traditional arm drag, you do it on someone substantially strong and they just pull their arm back. Here, it's really, really difficult to do this. And what that does is the more of these sorts of techniques that you're using in your game, especially for say an opening move, right? An arm drag where we're initially engaging. I'm kind of putting you on the back foot. I'm saying, hey, how well do you understand Jiu-Jitsu? Do you know what the correct response here is or have you just been getting by by, you know, being fast or pulling your way out of every situation? Uh kind of the difference between a really high-level technical grappler when you watch them and people don't have an answer for what they're doing. Much as I might not like him, you look at like a guy like Gordon Ryan's game, right? Where so many of his opponents, you can just see sometimes they've spent a long time cutting corners due to their strength or whatever and uh they fight someone like that and it's just a real struggle for them to present the right information in the right time and defend themselves. And when you can't do that, you're put progressively into worse and worse positions and unless I as the attacker suddenly switch gears and just go all athleticism, if I keep up with that technique, it can leave you in potentially a really, really bad spot pretty quickly. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And you talked about the importance of an arm drag as an opening technique. I think that's worth maybe elaborating on that concept because it's one of those things that no one ever explained to me when I was starting out. Sometimes the goal of a technique is not to complete a takedown or a back take or a submission. Sometimes the goal of a technique is to start a series of reactions from your opponent. It's like how in boxing, the jab is one of the most important techniques that you can have, but you're rarely going to knock a person out with a jab. That's not what it's there for. It's there to do things like manage distance and create other openings to set up a more powerful shot like a hook or an uppercut. In Jiu-Jitsu, the arm drag and a lot of these opening salvo techniques are very important even if you don't get the technique itself, right? Even if you don't technically get the arm drag, just the fact that you're forcing the other person to react to you makes it more and more likely that as you start kind of probing them with these techniques, eventually you're going to get a bigger opening that you can exploit. And that doesn't even get into the psychological aspect of this. If you're really good at this and you keep probing the person with these kind of these jab techniques like an arm drag, these kind of low commitment, low risk things that you can just do to make your opponent work, eventually you start getting in their head and then they realize, man, this person's going to keep trying to arm drag me. They're good at this. I better be ready. And then while they're focused on that, you can do something else, right? So, these opening salvo techniques are very important and the arm drag is a great one because unlike a lot of other takedowns or things that you might do from standing, you can just try an arm drag, you can do it from a decent distance, and depending on your hand configuration, it doesn't have to be super high risk to try an arm drag. It's just something you can do as a kind of a probing technique to make the other person start to create a few reactions. So, that's another thing that I encourage beginners to think about. They often think, well, if the technique didn't quote unquote succeed, then it's not good or I didn't do it right. That's not always the case. Sometimes the attempt of doing a technique itself has value even if you didn't technically complete the technique the way that it might say to in the instructional, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is an important component of defining like any of our techniques, like how useful they are is uh I probably didn't have the idea of like an opening move for a long time. This is something I wish someone had explained to me when I was a beginner that uh exactly what you're saying, you need a technique that's like universally applicable, that's easy to apply, that has some degree of low investment and maybe key here that also doesn't have a largely negative consequence if I fail it. If I go for this arm drag and I fail, no big deal. I can let go. It's it's totally fine. It's not the end of the world. Nothing really negative happens there. Whereas like maybe if the opening of my game is that I have to sit down and pull De La Riva on you or something like that, something high investment, or maybe even that my vision of a takedown is only that I double leg you and I pick you up and I drop you on your back. Now, there's such a high bar for that and there's so much room for me to fail that in a really negative way. And exactly what you said here is if we can start with something low power, low investment, but that potentially has a really good outcome that we can fire over and over, it's continually creating more and more viable situations for us that we can then take advantage of. And, you know, I really don't have to stop doing this. Another good point you made here is if my first arm drag fails, it's not like I'm going to throw the arm drag out the window. I'm just going to keep trying to arm drag you till it does work. Speaker 1: Yeah. Or even better, it gets to the point where you can almost uh Pavlovianly condition your opponent, right? If they see that arm drag more than once, eventually they're going to start thinking, okay, well, I just need to be ready for the arm drag all the time. And maybe they'll keep their elbow in tighter and pinched to prevent that. Okay, cool. That means that it's now easier for you to close the distance on them because they're keeping their elbows in. Or maybe if they're expecting that one move, then you can switch levels and shoot for a single or a double or a trip or something to that effect. So, even if you don't get the arm drag, the presence of that takes up space in your opponent's mind and that makes it easier for you then to move on to something else. Speaker 2: 100%. Actually, like, I see this amongst my students fairly regularly is like by this point, you know, none of them trust me. So, if I reach for anyone's arms, they'll often give such drastic responses that then it's almost like just free to take something else because people are so avoidant of that that they just don't want to get caught in the cycle of that happening over and over. But, I mean, you know, you can't give a drastic response in Jiu-Jitsu without a negative consequence, really. Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, if we were to kind of group arm drags into sort of broad categories, we talked about this a little bit earlier. There's a few different ways you can do it. One way is, I guess the classic way, which is where you pull the person's arm across your their body. That's a crossing the center technique. That's where you're you're taking their their body out of alignment by pulling their arm across the center of their body, their spine. It's the same mechanic that makes things like the gift wrap work when you're mounted on someone or you're you're playing top side control. And that position sucks, right? When you gift wrap someone's arm all the way around their their neck. The arm drag, the classic one is a similar concept where it works by pulling their arm across. So that's kind of one broad category of arm drags. The other one is an open elbow arm drag, like you talked about, where instead of trying to pull their arm across their center line, you're trying to flare their arm, you're trying to open their elbow, basically move their arm into a kimora type position just because that takes the muscle out of the game. Any other particular categories of arm drags or are those the two main ones that you often talk about? Speaker 2: So, I would say there's also a third that I think people are largely less familiar with. And that would be, uh, there's there's a version of this that that we do quite prolifically in my gym, often called like the bell tower arm drag. So, visualize you're going for the the standard cross arm drag. Maybe you determine right away, oh, I can't move this person. So, now, instead of trying to cross them, you're going to put both your hands on their wrist, you're going to sort of point both your arms straight down and you're hanging your weight off of this person, almost like you're pulling like the rope for a church bell. So, what this is doing is it's locking their arm out straight, but it's pointing it straight down as well. So, now I can hang my weight off of this person and I can sort of go head-to-head with them and wrestle them from this position. It's exceedingly difficult for them to remove their arm or really to rotate too much away from me. So, this sort of hanging arm drag, I think also maybe constitutes its own category. I'm not really trying to like necessarily win the traditional arm drag anymore at that point. What I'm doing is sort of sticking you in place. The same way we might think about like grips in judo, you know, sticking your feet to the ground. Speaker 1: Yeah. I am so glad you brought that up. I actually didn't think to classify this one accordingly, but um I use this one a lot and the thing I love about it is because of the angle, well, first of all, let me back this up here. The name, the calling it the bell tower. I've been looking for a good name for this technique for a long time and I love that name. That's this, like you said, if you want to visualize this, this is basically where you two on one the other person's arm. Normally you're double grabbing their wrist and basically you just let all of your body weight sag onto their arm. So their arm kind of gets pulled down to the ground. This really sucks to have done to you. And people often don't expect it because they don't think they can get arm dragged from this position. Where I do this a lot is from turtle. People often ask me because I I'm sort of I always talk about turtle on this podcast and people say, you know, what do you do from there? What does this look like? I don't like to do things like shoot singles or doubles from turtle because you have to really get in deep on someone's legs to do that and most Jiu-Jitsu people are good enough at this that they're not going to let you do that easily. And of course in Jiu-Jitsu, if you're playing turtle, you have to be tremendously defensive to make sure you don't open up a submission opportunity at any time, right? But this bell tower technique is one of my favorite ways to reverse from turtle where if the person brings their arm in close enough that I can grab it and they almost always do, then I just two on one them by the wrist, I staple their wrist to the floor and I just let my body weight hang off of that and they can't get their wrist up. And then I can just kind of start spinning out and getting up to my knees and to my feet and I can wind up on top and forcing them into turtle. So this is a really powerful technique and you can also do it from standing. It's really cool if you do because it forces a level change that the person doesn't expect, right? If you grab their wrist and then drag them down to the ground, you let your body weight do the work, it forces them to go down to the floor and people normally don't think that's going to happen when you arm drag them, right? They they think it's a standing game on their feet and then next thing you know, you get them into this awkward position on the floor. I have found that this works regardless of my opponent's size. I've done this to people much, much larger than me. It's just such a an awkward angle for them that no matter how strong they are, once you put all of your body weight onto their arm like an anchor, they're going to have to kneel down onto the ground. So it's a really cool way, especially for smaller people to get that bigger guy to the ground. And from there too, as the smaller person, often one of the advantages you have is you can do faster level changes than a bigger guy. So often I will use this to force the other person onto the ground to their knees and then I will stand up before they can. And so this is a really cheesy way to force them to turtle while I'm still up on my feet. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think any form of attachment like this where you can kind of hold the person frozen, uh has, you know, the other benefits of if now we're thinking in terms of maybe like judo or some other traditional stand-up arts, we're creating that open space that we need to really throw someone too. So, this is going to flow really well into a variety of other techniques, really easy to like seoi nage someone from here or to tuck between their legs or even to release the grip on the bell tower and then, you know, pull for a leg lock or something like that when the person stands up tall. So, a really, really great reflex. And this is kind of like where I was saying, the versatility of the arm drag is really its strength because now, I mean, look, we have we've established three clear pathways to totally different results. And even within those pathways, there's a ton of different options that are coming into play here. And a large number of these are not dependent on you being bigger or stronger or faster. They're really dependent on you understanding how to apply the technique, which, you know, makes it viable for everybody and that's really what we want out of a good technique. Speaker 1: Yeah. And you talked about the seoi nage, the classic shoulder throw. The main reason why you see this a lot more often in judo than in Jiu-Jitsu is because it's generally considered a high risk throw in Jiu-Jitsu since if you screw it up, you're probably going to have forced yourself onto the ground in turtle and because you pulled the other person's arm close to your neck, you could get choked there. So, people are often gun shy to do the seoi nage because the risk of failure is pretty high. You could wind up giving up your back and getting choked. That bell tower arm drag though is a great way to bail out if it fails. Because if you do a seoi nage, you've got control of the person's arm. If you drop to, let's say you do a drop seoi, you drop to your knees to try to throw the person and but they it just doesn't work. They base out. Well, as long as you've got their arm grabbed and you two on one them on the wrist and you bell tower them like you talked about, you punch their hand to the ground, they can't choke you from there. So that allows you even off of a failed seoi nage to get back up and escape. So if you are a judo player and you particularly like the uh the drop seoi, one of my favorite things to do from there is don't let go of their their arm if it fails. You know, punch that to the ground, use that bell tower technique and then from there, it's easier to escape and bail out and get to a neutral position again. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I would say maybe there's even a a fourth application, which is leading the arm drag itself into an attack. This is something I use the arm drag for pretty extensively. I really like judo, so I'm these days not so much firing a ton of arm drags off my feet, but a lot of times from a closed guard or half guard position, this is something I'm looking for and rather than necessarily looking for back exposure, I'm going to turn over behind the shoulder as I pull the arm past me and get on top of the person. So, rather than going low to their hips trying to put the hooks in, I'm coming up high to their shoulders and I'm looking for things like uh say like, do you know what I mean by the Fujiwara armbar? Like Yes, I do. I've talked about this before, but why don't you explain this to the listeners for those who don't follow the sport of kings, professional wrestling. Speaker 2: So, uh this is actually really become one of my favorite applications of the armbar. What I'm going to do is rather than the traditional Jiu-Jitsu fall back, you know, pull the arm across the front of my body, you know, be on my back trying to finish this. What I'm actually going to do is I'm going to try to sit up on top of the shoulder and I'm going to pull the arm up towards me. So the person is relatively face down or turtled or something along those lines. The arm drag's a good lead into this because quite often I can cross and then the person's trying to turn back to face you to defend and it's very easy to just sort of straddle the top of their shoulder when this is happening and then pull the wedge into your hips while your knees are both on the mat. The benefit to this is that my weight is on top of the other person. I'm pulling straight up, which is incredibly hard to defend once your arm's behind your back. Uh and just leverage wise, that is really difficult. I think everyone in Jiu-Jitsu someday faces the uh, you know, you're on top of someone and they can bicep curl you out of the armbar. And this really helps to negate that sort of thing as a possibility where I'm behind you. So there's really no escape other than maybe I let your arm go and you can pull it out, but there's no escape that results in you picking me up or turning me over at least. Speaker 1: Yeah. Now here's a question I have for you. So far, we've kind of talked about things in a uh kimono agnostic way, I guess. But of course, if you're training in the gi, you have way more gripping options available and that can impact the way that you do arm drags. I've seen a lot of people who when they're doing this in the gi, they prefer to grab the fabric rather than cupping the tricep. Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you adjust this technique when you're doing no-gi versus gi or do you prefer to kind of just do it the same no matter what? Speaker 2: I would say that I do appreciate having the grips, but as far as like the mechanical manipulation, like opening the elbow or how I'm moving you, I really do actually kind of try to keep that part uh maybe as you put it agnostic of the gi. I really want to manipulate your joints directly. So I'm going to call up someone here who's been on your podcast a lot, Bernacki. And this is where we kind of come into play with uh proxy versus direct control. So, proxy control is really strong for gripping and that is a case in which I'm gripping the gi. It's really wonderful for me to fasten to you or apply like force in certain areas or stop you from moving. But it really doesn't necessarily in all cases let me apply more force to like say rotating a joint or something. So I really want to apply that direct force and then maybe my sleeve grip or maybe once I'm into the position that I want, I'm going to take the elbow grip at that point. But I think up to that point, gripping the gi or something that can move around is less efficient than gripping the joints itself. Speaker 1: I'm very much the same. With the arm drag, I don't like to grip the gi. I will use no-gi grips even if I'm training in the gi for the arm drag. And the reason why is first of all, like we talked about with the arm drag, you often want to catch the person somewhat quickly. If you give them a second to brace, then it's easier for them to defend. And I find that that split second it takes to kind of curl your fingers and find a good fabric grip, that's a lost time that with an arm drag, you can't afford to lose. It's a little bit different if you're pinning someone on top side control and you've got time to get the grips you want, but when you're standing with someone or when they're in your guard, if you're spending time trying to figure out the perfect gi grips, often that split second that you've lost is enough to make the technique non-viable. The other thing too, and you mentioned this briefly is, you know, to go back to Bernacki's concepts, if you grab someone directly, like you cup their tricep, he would call that direct control, whereas if you're grabbing the gi and you're pulling them around, you're not actually connecting with them directly. You're grabbing a thing that is connected to them. Rob would call that proxy control. And in this case, proxy control is a bit is often going to be a bit looser for arm drags anyway. That is often the case. You know, if you grab someone by like the the fabric behind their elbow or if you grab them by their sleeve fabric, there's just a bit of wiggle room because you're not grabbing them directly. They can slip and slide and move a bit and it's exactly how much is going to depend on how tight their gi is. And with an arm drag, that can really matter. You know, if the person has the ability to slip just an inch or two, that can really change the viability of this technique. So for those reasons, for this technique, for the arm drag, I don't like to grab the fabric. The one consideration though for the gi is that even if you don't want to grab their fabric, they can still grab yours. So, if for example, they get a good uh lapel grip on you, it's really hard to do the arm drag unless you can force them to release that grip, right? Because they've got their hand anchored to your kimono now. So, that's something to just be mindful of. That is one place where the arm drag can go wrong in the gi is if you're trying to do it, but they've just got a solid grip on you, it might be hard to complete the arm drag. It's also possible if your gi is open that their hand can get stuck inside your gi, which is sometimes a problem too because that can prevent you from moving. But those aside, I generally am in the same mindset as you where I would prefer to do a no-gi style arm drag even in the gi. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think even when we're talking grip fighting, something like a lapel grab, right? That's that's a valid point. Uh can really like keep you from completing that. But on the other side of that, I mean, depending on how nice you are, you've got uh like a viable mirror lock and things like that coming into play if someone's really just trying to anchor on you. Once again, like extreme results often result in negative outcomes for someone. So death gripping somebody to prevent them from arm dragging you might really result in something that you don't want to have happen. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Well, the other thing too is you can force the other person to arm drag themselves, right? If they grab your lapel really, really tightly and you just can't break that grip, if you do the uh like the matrix dodge, you know, Neo from the Matrix, right? Where you kind of pivot your torso, if they're gripped really hard onto your lapel, if you do that, then it forces them to arm drag themselves unless they release the grip. So, that's kind of another option too. If the person is super committed to grabbing onto you, you can take advantage of that because if you move your body, they have to move with you unless they're willing to release the grip. And sometimes if you do that fast enough, you can catch them and they can wind up arm dragging themselves before they even have a chance to release it. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Even in the um, you know, competitive arm drag situation that we we kind of detailed to begin with where maybe someone's stronger than you and you try to arm drag them and they arm drag you back. You can even, I mean, viably sell that intentionally letting them win the arm drag and then moving yourself out of position and ending up somewhere more positive. So there's a lot of possible outcomes here depending on once again, you know, your understanding of the situation. When you throw this as purely an athletic technique where you're visualizing it like you're desperately grabbing a rope and now you've got to move this big weight, you know, there's only one possible outcome there. You either move them or you don't. But when you apply it as a complex technique that is just your opening move in in a game of chess, you know, where there's a ton of possible outcomes and I'm not unhappy with whatever result I get, now it becomes a real weapon. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Great point too about how it's not always about forcing them to move. You've probably heard the saying that if you can't move them, move yourself. And that's often a way to get value out of the arm drag. If you can't move them, you can always hold their arm in position and move yourself. And that can be handy too because that way you can get a dominant angle on them even if you're not able to pull them off balance. And by holding the arm in place, you make it harder for them to turn back towards and face you. So, there's a lot of ways that you can get value out of this technique. Again, I think that like you mentioned earlier, the important thing is to think of the arm drag as an opening salvo or a tool that is useful beyond just completing the technique. It forces a reaction and that in itself has value, especially in the early stages of a match. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And um, I mean, also, it's really a problem solver. If we visualize, you know, entering butterfly, just like stand up, I think sometimes the hardest part of entering a position like butterfly is like getting in, getting our hooks connected. So, arm drag also a a good outside grip control there, pulling the person in close enough to get your hooks attached. Once again, not something that you have to drastically win for that to work. I don't have to, you know, pull you across me, take your back or, you know, flip you over or like suddenly lace you and bear and bowl you. Like, I really just have to grab your wrist and then scoot towards you. That's a really low amount of effort that we're asking someone to exert right there and not a lot of real like potential to resist that completely. Speaker 1: So, let's also talk about the way that you teach this. Of course, in a standard gym, you're going to have people of all experience levels, all shapes and sizes, all kind of goals in the sport. Do you adjust your methods for teaching, let's talk about the arm drag as an example here. Do those methods get modified based on whether you're training a a young person or an old person or a competitor or a casual grappler? Or do you find that the methods are the same for communicating this info regardless of who it is that you're communicating to? Speaker 2: So, I in a way, yes. I mean, obviously like we're going to have to adjust for body type and size, limb length and things like that. But that's more just about letting the person find where they're comfortable. I think that it is somewhat disparaging to, as I look at it, like teach down. So, if you have a class with beginners or hobbyists versus competitors, like, yes, maybe people who do Jiu-Jitsu every day or to a higher degree or more aggressively are going to grasp it more quickly because uh they probably have more information, more context to work with. But if you teach a dumber version of the technique in an effort to make it easier for them to grasp, you're really doing a disservice. You're missing a lot of relevant information. So, you should kind of expect the same thing out of everyone. And what that means is this kind of flows into what we've been talking about with the arm drag that if we're teaching techniques reliant on athleticism or strength or whatever, that's kind of where we're going wrong to start with. Those things are great augments. So, if you're really strong and then you apply the correct technique with those two things together, now you get a magnified result, right? But it doesn't mean that the person who's not strong shouldn't be able to do the technique. The technique should kind of work objectively in space by itself. And then, you know, it's modified by all the physical and otherwise traits that are going on between the two people. But no, no, like I I really try not to teach down. Children, same thing. I would teach the technique exactly the same way. Now, I do make an effort to make the information as clear and straightforward as possible, that all said, right? So, I'm not trying to necessarily give everyone every single bit of information at one time. I think even a seasoned competitor is really going to struggle sometimes. I mean, Steve, how many seminars have you been to at this point and it's like, I'm sure there's times where you've been like, there's no way I can get all these details at once, right? Like Speaker 1: That's my biggest gripe with seminars is often when you go to these things, it feels like the instructor there is trying to just razzle dazzle you and they'll often throw a whole bunch of techniques at you that will be in one ear, out the other. Often they're very specific things that aren't really generally applicable and there's so much info being thrown at you that it's not really conducive to learning. I would suggest that for people, if you want to run a seminar, focus on teaching less rather than teaching more. It's better to teach one thing and have your students retain it than teach a dozen things that they all immediately forget and never use. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. All the best seminars that I've been to over the years have been people that have tried to explain, you know, the underlying concept behind why they do something or, you know, they haven't come to show off like all their newest, fanciest like techniques they've been using in competition. They've explained like how they've come to those conclusions, like what what are they doing? What are they thinking when they're out there? Like how do they make a technique useful? And I think those are the tools that as an instructor, like you should be striving to give your students. I really love like coaching more than competing. And this is something I focused on for a long time is how do you give everyone of every level kind of the same experience in Jiu-Jitsu? I expect the same out of my students who come train, you know, one or two days a week as I do out of my ones that are dedicated to compete. And are they going to reach the same level? Like, no, probably not, right? Like you have to put in an amount of work to do that. But do I expect that, you know, a soccer mom can reach the same technique level as somebody who's competing? Yeah, absolutely. That's what I expect is that the understanding should be the same. The application will be different though. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And I think that even to this day, it kind of frustrates me when instructors don't teach in that manner. When I was earlier on, I was often taught what techniques are, maybe with a bit of how to do them. And I really would have liked to know why to do them or when to do them or who should do them or who you should do them on or where to do them. The context that makes a technique viable. When you just focus on what a technique is and going through the steps to it, sometimes people don't understand the context and it makes it harder for them to adapt to their particular body type and style. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so like we spend a month on every position and that's all we do is like the first week of every month, we all we do is talk about the rules in a position, like what makes the position work, what does it do? And it's the same thing teaching any specific technique. It's it's kind of a microcosm of that. You should explain like what does this technique do? Okay, great. We get the idea of what the technique should do. Now, how do we like apply pressure to that? Uh how do we make that technique work? What are the mechanics behind it? And once you start to grasp those things, now you don't need to hold somebody's hand, you know, like I can show you my best version of the arm drag. And if you see it, there's no way you're going to replicate it. You're you're not going to get all the subtle details. And even if I spend a long time explaining them to you, what if in the end, honestly, that's not like suitable for you. You know, like Steve, you like to turtle, right? But can you instantly transmit all the information that you are thinking and and how you operate the turtle with someone else? Probably not, but I bet you could definitely explain the major beats of why you go to turtle and what it's for and they would immediately get value out of that. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's actually why I like audio as a vehicle for talking about this stuff because we often in Jiu-Jitsu rely on visuals as a crutch. And visuals can be helpful because sometimes you just want to know where is this person putting their hand? And it can be helpful to see it as a reference. But that type of instruction often works well for very specific things where you're trying to duplicate the movements of someone else. And in Jiu-Jitsu, understanding how to do something often means that you're figuring out the best way to do it for yourself. So duplicating exactly what some other instructor is doing is not necessarily the best way to learn a move. The nice thing about audio is we don't have that as a crutch. So we have to explain why do we do these things and what are the concepts? Because it's very hard for me to tell someone through audio, left hand on the right hip, you know, to go through exactly every single piece of the body positioning. However, what we can do is we can talk about the ideas. And then from there, people can use those ideas to engineer their own solutions. So I think that this is an especially good vehicle if you want to communicate that kind of stuff to people. That's why I think you hear many good coaches talk about the importance of having a bit of a mat chat segment. I mean, this kind of flies in the face of, you know, good motor learning practice, but sometimes it's good to just sit down and talk to people and get their brains engaged because it helps them reason through why they're doing what they're doing and that can lead to better decisions or a better idea of maybe where to focus their movement. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And I would say this kind of falls in line with with how I teach is I've really been pleased over the last few years seeing the evolution of things like uh, you know, eco teaching coming up and stuff like that. I wouldn't say I necessarily like adhere to that idea exactly, but I think that's necessary is like letting people find their own way to sort of manifest the technique, but you also do need to give them understanding. So, yeah, you can't sit there and preach from the mountain top. Like nobody's really ever going to do your Jiu-Jitsu the way that you do it. When I was in Florida, I regularly would go down and train with Bruno Malfacine or Jacare Souza. And it's like, I learned a ton of really interesting information from just being around both of those guys, right? Like extremely talented Jiu-Jitsu athletes at the absolute top of their game. But like, do you think I can replicate any of that? No, of course not. I had to distill that down to what made sense for me. And so I think you need both. I think you need understanding and then you need a chance to explore with that understanding and see how that's going to apply. So, without both sides of that, I think sometimes like we don't give enough information or understanding to someone and they don't really know where to go with it, you know, like or we give all training or all information to the exclusion of the other, you know, both ways kind of unhealthy, I think. Speaker 1: Well, as we close this off, Nieve, anything else that you wanted to discuss on the topic of the arm drag which we missed so far? Speaker 2: Uh no, I think that's been pretty great. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, let's talk about the gym here. If people are in your area, tell me about the gym, how they can find you and how they can reach out and contact you. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So we're located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. We've been there about two years now, so we're probably one of the newest gyms in the city. Like I said, I I relocated here from Orlando. Um we're a pretty like culture first gym. You can find us at snowblindbjj.net online pretty easily. And we have a pretty visible gym, so it's pretty easy to find if you're in the neighborhood. We have, you know, open mats, everything during the week. I really actually love drop-ins and I go out and drop in at a whole lot of gyms and teach other classes and things like that as well. Speaker 1: That's awesome, man. Yeah, we've got a quite a contingent of people in the Washington area. There's a lot of good gyms there and of course, many of the people that I know vouch for you specifically. So, definitely recommend people check out Snowblind if they're in the area. I will put links to all of your stuff in the show notes to make it easy for people to find if they want to head up your website or contact you on social media. As always, I'll put a link to our stuff too. BJJmentalmodels.com is where everything lives. All of the episodes of the podcast like this one, the long form episodes, they're all completely free. There's well over 300 of them at this point. We're up to over 350 now. So that's a lot of content. If you're looking for a quicker way to digest some of the big ideas we talk about, we've also got mini episodes which bring you up to speed much faster all in that feed. And our newsletter is around 14,000 people now. Also free, you definitely want to get on that. And I always tell people, please do consider going premium with us if you haven't already. Premium is the way that we pay the bills here. It's the reason we don't have ads. The reason you'd want to join, it's the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses on strategy, tactics, concepts, mindset, kind of the philosophy of how to grapple effectively. We talk a lot about things that don't fit cleanly into traditional instructionals and audio is an amazing vehicle for that like you might have seen in Audible or Masterclass. So if you like those services, you're probably going to like us. There's also amazing premium only podcasts that you get if you go premium with us. Rob Bernacki's podcast is on there, Emily Kwok's podcast is on there. So if these are coaches that you get a lot of value out of, this is the best way to kind of get a direct ongoing feed to what they're working on and where they're finding success. And of course, we also offer rolling reviews. Some of the best black belts in the world can give you direct feedback on your grappling specifically, filling in that missing hole that you might not be getting in the gym. And of course, if you are a business owner, we actually can help you provide marketing and support as well there. We've got a great platform for helping businesses get more visibility. So if you are a Jiu-Jitsu gym owner or otherwise a Jiu-Jitsu business owner and you don't even know where to start with building up your reputation, shoot us a message and we will talk about getting the ball rolling for you. Again, all of that's at bjjmentalmodels.com and I'll put a link in the show notes. But Nieve, thanks so much for doing this, man. A great technique, a bread and butter technique, but it also a technique that there's always more to learn about and you never outgrow it. It's not one of those white belt only moves that you're going to put aside. A good arm drag can win world championships just as much as it can help a no-stripe white belt. So, big thanks for coming by and talking about this with me. Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks so much, Steve. Speaker 1: Always welcome. And thank you to the listeners too. I really do appreciate everyone here hanging out with us all the time. It's great to talk to you all and I will see you in the next one. Have a great week.